This phantastic data set provided a good opportunity to question the common practise in palaeontology (and sometimes outside of it) to infer trees based on matrices that do not have a lot of treelike signal but are riddled by internal signal conflict. An ideal test example for a post on the Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks addressing a long-ignored property of (all) morphological data sets.

Signals from morphological matrices are not trivial, especially not when using individuals as OTUs. Hence, palaeontologists should stop relying exclusively on (strict or majority rule) consensus trees, and start with (network-assisted) exploratory data analysis. Soft polytomies are no safe ground, but reason to dig deeper (methology-wise).